Big Sugar’s Assault on the Everglades

Some Americans are aware that the federal sugar program makes their food cost more. But few know this same program is causing environmental wreckage in Florida that their tax dollars will have to pay for.

The sugar program, known to its many critics as the “sugar racket,” is a tangle of price supports, which increase the cost of sugar in the U.S., and tariffs and quotas on imported sugar, which keeps cheaper sugar from reaching our market.

“There’s probably no better example in U.S. history of a case of both legal plunder and crony capitalism that has been tolerated for so many years, and that has picked more money from the pockets of Americans,” than the sugar program, says American Enterprise Institute economist Mark J. Perry, who has shown that “American consumers and domestic sugar-using industries have been forced to pay twice the world price of sugar for many generations.”

But it’s a great deal for the three Florida companies that produce nearly half of the country’s sugar supply: U.S. Sugar, the Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida, and the Fanjul Corp., which has helped fund Sen. Marco Rubio’s political career, obliging him to support government subsidies he should philosophically oppose.

Beyond the economic harm done by the sugar program is the environmental damage to Everglades National Park, a 1.5 million acre wetlands preserve located near Florida’s southern edge. According to the National Park Service, the Everglades are a World Heritage Site, a Biosphere Reserve, and a Wetland of International Significance. It is also the “largest subtropical wilderness in the United States,” the “predominant water recharge area for all of South Florida,” and home, as well, to almost 750 species of mammals, birds, reptiles and fish. In short, it’s a natural treasure.

As it turns out, federal policy has provided Big Sugar with a strong financial incentive to foul this wilderness.

“Subsidies are also thought to induce the excessive use of fertilizers and pesticides, which can cause water contamination problems. Sugar cane production has expanded in Florida because of the federal sugar program…and the phosphorous in fertilizers used by growers causes damage to the Everglades.”

An effort to protect this sensitive region was initiated in 2000 through the Water Resource Development Act, which authorized the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan. Part of the restoration included construction of a reservoir that would hold Lake Okeechobee runoff. The objective was to stop the flow of those harmful agricultural nutrients into the Everglades, Florida’s rivers and eventually its beaches.

But critics say that the sugar industry has been a less-than-cooperative partner in the restoration effort.

“Since the 1990s,” The New Tropic reported last summer, “Big Sugar has been able to fend off state water clean-up requirements and routinely leave us, the taxpayers, to pick up the bill for Everglades restoration efforts.”

Big Sugar is certainly big, but its lobbying influence exceeds its weight class, as its successful obstruction of the Everglades plan shows.

Maybe this is because the “OPEC of sugar” funds its strong-arm lobbying efforts with the hefty profits it generates with the assistance of government policy. And with the price of sugar in the U.S. often twice as high as the global price, those profits are abundant – causing American consumers to pay an extra $1.4 billion for sugar in fiscal 2013, according to research from Heritage Foundation policy analyst Bryan Riley.

It would be well-deserved justice if Big Sugar was made to pay a substantial portion of the Everglades’ restoration costs. Why not? The reservoir alone, which moved a small step closer to reality this spring when state lawmakers approved a measure to secure at least some of the needed land, will cost an estimated $1.5 billion to $2.4 billion.

Not often do free-market advocates and environmental activists become allies. But they can find common ground on this issue. A strong coalition advancing from both sides would be a potent political force for ending the sugar racket.

One response to Big Sugar’s Assault on the Everglades

HOW DOES LEGALIZING THE CANNABIS PLANT, INCLUDING COMMERCIAL HEMP CROP CULTIVATION AND USE, HELP BOTH FLORIDA AND ALL OF AMERICA’S ENVIRONMENT IN 2017— ON

This is my opening the door letter from the FLORIDIANS FOR FREEDOM to the environmental groups, Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club; hopefully to be soon joined by the League of Women Voters, as well as the Florida AFL-CIO, whose statewide labor movement members and all ten regional Central Labor Council’s I am already visiting and asking them join this powerful mix of statewide and national forces for positive political change, and we have a winning coalition, not just in Florida, the 3rd largest state in the USA, but extending our statewide joint success onto the national scene.

My name is Christopher M. Kennard, and I have been an active member in the past with each and every group noted above, and some of those noted below this paragraph. I participated in organizing the City of Gainesville neighborhoods and Alachua County citizens, in general, to end the air, water and land polluting activities of the now designated EPA Superfund site of Koppers Wood Treatment Plant. Much of this was well documented in local and some state newspaper chains, as well as TV and radio news coverage.

I did this with the citizens of the community, the Labor Movement, left wing progressive organizations (Rainbow Coalition of Alachua County) and with the needed aid and assistance of the Sierra Club, the Friends of the Earth, Clean Water Action Project, and League of Women Voters, all of whom I was proudly an active and strong supporter and member of for years.

Along with many others, I formed working coalitions with each and everyone, as well as being a Florida AFL-CIO North Central Florida delegate, officer and the Labor Movement’s designated Environmental Committee Outreach Committee contact person, in the 1980’s. It is my sincere hope and goal to resurrect this localized coalition to a statewide citizen’s environmental advocacy movement pertaining to these matters of ending the prohibition of cannabis (and organic based hemp crop commercial cultivation) in Florida to address pressing environmental issues.

Currently, I am a volunteer member and a North Central Florida volunteer coordinator organizing the petition collection drive for the RIGHT OF ADULTS TO CANNABIS [Serial # 15-20] which legalizes cannabis, and ends the prohibition of cannabis in Florida.

The Green Party of Florida and Libertarian Party of Florida both recently agreed at their Florida State Conventions to make legalizing cannabis (and hemp) a leading state issue, with candidates making also making productive note of legalizing cannabis for both medicinal and personal use by adults in Florida.

Equally important, if not more important to South Florida and both coastlines extending northward from the southern tip of the state are the environmental uses of hemp crop cultivation to stop and reverse damage caused by the many decades ignorance and avoidance to sugar fields, excess nitrogen and water issues that can be partially remedied by ending the prohibition of cannabis and hemp.

We can use environmentally friendly, drought resistance hemp crop cultivation on a large scale today, for cleaning environmentally harmful excess nitrogen rich muck, former sugar fields and cattle land soils, and, importantly, to stop the algae bloom damage being done to both coastal estuaries and coastlines along the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf.

For Florida, commercial hemp cultivation is an efficient, inexpensive, useful, practical way of “cleaning” vast areas of land from excess sugar field nitrogen causing the runoff into the Everglades, and now the coastal algae choking waterways. This statewide issue is ripe to use. It impacts us all. Down in south Florida, it is an avenue to attract political attention, support and success.

As many have stressed to me, everyone understands legal cannabis is good, just on it’s own, even though many may not know the particulars of hemp crop cultivation, both it’s many environmental uses as a commercial crop, and the fact that Henry Ford sold his process and patent converting hemp (once America’s most extensively grown crop), to use to make automotive fuel and motor oil, just like the super-expensive conversion of corn for ethanol for fuel use, to a corrupt cabal of industrialists and financiers who had powerful and corrupt friends in government. They made hemp

This corrupt cabal of people set out to pollute the earth for an easy buck! Now, everyone who uses petroleum products in any shape and form are part and parcel to being complicit as to being part of the “problem”.

It is kind of like planting golf course grass and allowing large cattle barons and sugar companies reap further profit by using up our underground water reserves, even as we watch our fresh water supplies disappear and our lakes, rivers, marshes, creeks and streams recede.

So, collectively, we close our eyes and wave protest signs is a whole lot easier to do than to organize fellow Floridians to vote!

I single out certain corrupt players, Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, new newspaper chain mogul Wm. Hearst, U. S. Secretary of Treasury Andrew Mellon III, along with corrupt federal prohibition officials, elected politicians and other international and national players of the 1930’s.

It was this merry little and powerful band of the mega-wealthy “1 % elite” who adroitly rendered illegal both hemp and cannabis [“marihuana”— to use the largely unknown Mexican Spanish word used to make cannabis and hemp illegal, by disguising they were one and the same] in one fell swoop.

Now, today, we have the ability, knowledge, and the crying need to end our country’s petroleum based manufacturing industries and transform into a world shaking leadership position of producing and promoting earth friendly hemp based plastics, oil, fuel, construction materials, paper, etc.

It is a tall order to believe we can make such a change from petroleum to hemp, so we remain trying to stop oil production and transit through pipelines, by ship and on trucks and rail. We watch the damage done by clear-cutting forests and “planned pine tree plantations” throughout Florida, where trees still remain to be removed. Hemp makes construction materials to replace lumber, and far better, more durable paper without all of the toxic wastewater and residue of making paper out of trees. An issue in Florida!

I could not help but to make the connection with issues such as ending the use of plastic bags being made of petroleum based processes, rather than also taking the next step forward to provide a practical solution — promote the use of biodegradable hemp based plastics, which is earth friendly to use, commercially easy to grow, and ecologically friendly to process, using environmentally safe, pollution free manufacturing production methods.

I commented on the matter last weekend, at the Green Party State Convention and the Libertarian State Convention, both held this last May, 2017. I believe these two political parties heard, and will heed the call to lead the State of Florida, and onward to the rest of the country, as applicable. I will add, we connected this to our need to address land and water conservation, and for environmentally forward thinking put into local and statewide action — to promote and produce positive change to clean and protect our Mother Earth, as well as protect all whom live upon her.

I am contacting all of the above, and hope to hear from you first, in hopes of speeding along a Floridians’ citizen advocacy coalition focused on real and lasting environmental care and resources we can use to reverse the damage we have already done, and to prevent future errors in our ways, tomorrow.

Peace Love Light within and with each and all, and those we Love and seek to protect through a people’s peaceful “political revolution,”… always!